Starting off 2017

Let’s try to start of 2017 and spend more time here. Writing on my weblog used to be something I would do often and I actually enjoyed it, but I never made it a priority and it’s languished. I look back on it with regret, and that’s wrong – it’s just a thing that happened.

I still work at CenturyLink but I got a promotion last year to management and it’s been a fantastic experience. I spent the last 6 1/2 months on the road most weeks, travelling across 6 states working with a team of fantastic sales engineers, and that caused me to reevaluate my life habits in general. Like most people, I have good days and bad so in 2017, I’m going to try to handle things by focusing on “streaks”:

Fitness: It’s a tired trope of blogs, but I’m going to try to streak for fitness. I live pretty close to a 24 hour gym and that means that I’ve got opportunity and motive to spend each day there, doing something active. If I can streak it to 7 days straight, then I’ll try for 2 weeks, then 4 weeks and hopefully the habit is built. I read about someone that spend last year running 2,016 miles and the idea of doing something like that for 2017 makes some sense. I can’t run that well, but walking/running for 2,017 miles throughout the year gives me a goal with perspective. I’m hoping that streaking gym time will push me in other directions like weights and general fitness.

Food: Food and good eating habits are in my brain, but I usually take an easy way out when I’m on the road for work. I’m going to find a way to avoid the bad stuff while out of the office and again, streak it until I find a new balance point. My focus is the streak of good decisions, not the meal-to-meal success or failure.

Structure: I’m planning my time more because with the new job, the “8-5” of the work day can be very random with priorities. I’m going to log my time spent on things during the month of January and use that as a skeleton of a schedule for future months.

I think 3 things are enough to focus on for now. I know from experience in previous years that these will deliver benefits on the side, like stress reduction, weight reduction and “happiness”.